No Evidence for an Auditory Attentional Blink for Voices Regardless of Musical Expertise.

Merve Akça,Bruno Laeng,Rolf Inge Godøy

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02935

Abstract

Background: Attending to goal-relevant information can leave us metaphorically “blind” or “deaf” to the next relevant information while searching among distracters. This temporal cost lasting for about a half a second on the human selective attention has been long explored using the attentional blink paradigm. Although there is evidence that certain visual stimuli relating to one's area of expertise can be less susceptible to attentional blink effects, it remains unexplored whether the dynamics of temporal selective attention vary with expertise and objects types in the auditory modality.Methods: Using the auditory version of the attentional blink paradigm, the present study investigates whether certain auditory objects relating to musical and perceptual expertise could have an impact on the transient costs of selective attention. In this study, expert cellists and novice participants were asked to first identify a target sound, and then to detect instrumental timbres of cello or organ, or human voice as a second target in a rapid auditory stream.Results: The results showed moderate evidence against the attentional blink effect for voices independent of participants' musical expertise. Experts outperformed novices in their overall accuracy levels of target identification and detection, reflecting a clear benefit of musical expertise. Importantly, the musicianship advantage disappeared when the human voices served as the second target in the stream.Discussion: The results are discussed in terms of stimulus salience, the advantage of voice processing, as well as perceptual and musical expertise in relation to attention and working memory performances.

Highlights

Attentional blink (AB; Raymond et al, 1992) refers to the phenomenon that when two targets are presented in close temporal proximity, report of the second target (T2) is often impaired after correctly identifying the first target (T1)
The perceptual expertise with voices refers to the common human experience that is associated with higher level of perceptual capacity for voices, shaped by extensive exposure to human voices for years on a daily basis, while the musical expertise refers to advanced levels of music performance experience combined with extensive training in music
Employing the auditory version of the attentional blink paradigm, we explored the temporal costs of selective attention among expert cellist and novice participants for different auditory objects through systematically manipulating the type of the second target and the interval between the first and second target presented in a rapid auditory stream

Summary

Introduction

Attentional blink (AB; Raymond et al, 1992) refers to the phenomenon that when two targets are presented in close temporal proximity, report of the second target (T2) is often impaired after correctly identifying the first target (T1). The aim of the present study is to investigate temporal dynamics of selective auditory attention and whether these dynamics can be modulated by an individual’s expertise and the objects of this expertise. Attending to goal-relevant information can leave us metaphorically “blind” or “deaf” to the relevant information while searching among distracters This temporal cost lasting for about a half a second on the human selective attention has been long explored using the attentional blink paradigm. There is evidence that certain visual stimuli relating to one’s area of expertise can be less susceptible to attentional blink effects, it remains unexplored whether the dynamics of temporal selective attention vary with expertise and objects types in the auditory modality

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Discussion

Conclusion